Voice and Accountability 2008

Report year 2008·Data year 2008

Voice and Accountability estimate (−2.5 to 2.5)·Higher is better — rank 1 leads·Published by World Bank Group

24 editions (1996–2022), covering 197 to 200 countries — one of the widest panels on the site. One of the six Worldwide Governance Indicators: how far a country’s people can choose their own government, and whether they have freedom of expression, freedom of association and a free press. It is here because Democracy & Civil Liberties had exactly ONE indicator before 2026-09-07, and this is the broadest measure of the subject that exists — V-Dem covers 176 countries, this covers 200. ⚠ THE “PERCENTILE RANK” COLUMN IS NOT A LEAGUE POSITION. It is a place on a 0–100 scale, so 97 means “above 97% of countries”, not “97th”. The Bank orders nobody 1, 2, 3, so no `global_rank` is stored; the POSITION shown on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score, and labelled as ours. ⚠ The estimate is a z-score: the world average is 0 by construction every year, which means a country can improve in absolute terms and still fall, and the scale cannot tell you whether the world as a whole got better. ⚠ The same figures also appear as a column of the `government-effectiveness` table, which is where all six WGI dimensions can be read side by side. They agree by construction — one importer reads one workbook in one pass. ⚠ Left out of the Country Index deliberately: loading several dimensions of one publisher’s work into a composite would weight governance over and over.

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